Max Weber Quotes

40 Sourced Quotes

Only by strict specialization can the scientific worker become fully conscious, for once and perhaps never again in his lifetime, that he has achieved something that will endure. A really definitive and good accomplishment is today always a specialized act.

Max Weber
Social economic problems do not exist everywhere that an economic event plays a role as cause or effect - since problems arise only where the significance of those factors is problematical and can be precisely determined only through the application of methods of social-economics.

Max Weber
The concept of the 'official secret' is its [bureaucracy's] specific invention.

Max Weber
The impulse to acquisition, pursuit of gain, of money, of the greatest possible amount of money, has in itself nothing to do with capitalism. This impulse exists and has existed among waiters, physicians, coachmen, artists, prostitutes, dishonest officials, soldiers, nobles, crusaders, gamblers, and beggars.

Max Weber
The primary task of a useful teacher is to teach his students to recognize 'inconvenient' facts - I mean facts that are inconvenient for their party opinions.

Max Weber
All the analysis of infinite reality which the finite human mind can conduct rests on the tacit assumption that only a finite portion of this reality constitutes the object of scientific investigation, and that only it is 'important' in the sense of being 'worthy of being known.

Max Weber
Culture' is a finite segment of the meaningless infinity of the world process, a segment on which human beings confer meaning and significance.

Max Weber
Ideas come when we do not expect them, and not when we are brooding and searching at our desks. Yet ideas would certainly not come to mind had we not brooded at our desks and searched for answers with passionate devotion.

Max Weber
Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth - that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible.

Max Weber
Every type of purely direct concrete description bears the mark of artistic portrayal.

Max Weber
The so-called materialistic conception of history, with the crude elements of genius of the early form which appeared, for instance, in the Communist Manifesto, still prevails only in the minds of laymen and dilettantes.

Max Weber
One can say that three pre-eminent qualities are decisive for the politician: passion, a feeling of responsibility, and a sense of proportion.

Max Weber
Those human groups that
entertain a subjective belief in
their common descent because of similarities of physical type or of customs or both, or because of memories of colonization
and migration; this belief must be important for group
formation; furthermore it does not matter whether an objective blood relationship exists.

Max Weber
One cannot with impunity try to transfer this task entirely to mechanical assistants if one wishes to figure something, even though the final result is often small indeed.

Max Weber
Science today is a "vocation" organized in special disciplines in the service of self-clarification and knowledge of interrelated facts. It is not the gift of grace of seers and prophets dispensing sacred values and revelations, nor does it partake of the contemplation of sages and philosophers about the meaning of the Universe.

Max Weber
Laws are important and valuable in the exact natural sciences, in the measure that those sciences are universally valid.

Max Weber
It is not astonishing that there are many journalists who have become human failures and worthless men. Rather, it is astonishing that, despite all this, this very stratum includes such a great number of valuable and quite genuine men, a fact that outsiders would not so easily guess.

Max Weber
Within the confines of the lecture hall, no other virtue exists but plain intellectual integrity.

Max Weber
All knowledge of cultural reality, as may be seen, is always knowledge from particular points of view.

Max Weber
Puritanism carried the ethos of the rational organization of capital and labor. It took over from the Jewish ethic only what was adapted to this purpose.

Max Weber
The term 'charisma' will be applied to a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is considered extraordinary and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These are such as are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a 'leader.

Max Weber
The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the 'disenchantment of the world.' Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations. It is not accidental that our greatest art is intimate and not monumental.

Max Weber
In Baxter's view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the saint like 'a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.' But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.

Max Weber
Only he has the calling for politics who is sure that he will not crumble when the world from his point of view is too stupid or base for what he wants to offer. Only he who in the face of all this can say 'In spite of all!' has the calling for politics.

Max Weber
In the midst of a culture that is rationally organized for a vocational workaday life, there is hardly any room for the cultivation of acosmic brotherliness, unless it is among strata who are economically carefree. Under the technical and social conditions of rational culture, an imitation of the life of Buddha, Jesus, or Francis seems condemned to failure for purely external reasons.

Max Weber
Who—aside from certain big children who are indeed found in the natural sciences—still believes that the findings of astronomy, biology, physics, or chemistry could teach us anything about the meaning of the world?

Max Weber
The career of politics grants a feeling of power. The knowledge of influencing men, of participating in power over them, and above all, the feeling of holding in one's hands a nerve fiber of historically important events can elevate the professional politician above everyday routine even when he is placed in formally modest positions.

Max Weber
In a democracy the people choose a leader in whom they trust. Then the chosen leader says, 'Now shut up and obey me.' People and party are then no longer free to interfere in his business.

Max Weber
Inspiration in the field of science by no means plays any greater role, as academic conceit fancies, than it does in the field of mastering problems of practical life by a modern entrepreneur. On the other hand, and this also is often misconstrued, inspiration plays no less a role in science than it does in the realm of art.

Max Weber
Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.

Max Weber